Flawless Lip Sync

My French is très rusty, but even without understanding the language (thankfully, there are English captions) I was impressed by the lip-synced characters in “Tout le bloc en parle” by MonsieurCaron. While there are an abundance of brick animations that add digital mouths to minifigs, and a few that swap out physical minifig heads, it is very rare to see brick-built mouth animation. In fact, the only other examples I can think of are “Country Buildin’” and “Little Guys” by the illustrious co-author of this blog.

The influence of “Country Buildin'” on “Tout le bloc en parle” is clear not only in the brick-built characters, but also in the use of forced perspective sets for the background. That doesn’t take anything away from MonsieurCaron’s considerable accomplishments here. The characters are well-designed and fluidly animated and I found the use of miniland scale (see chapter 4 of The Unofficial Lego Builder’s Guide) characters for the audience particularly inspired. I mention the clear heritage of “Country Buildin'” mostly because it’s a good excuse to promote the two excellent behind-the-scenes videos which show all that goes into to making an animation at this scale.

Also, vive les enseignants!